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Seven Sinners
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (9th November 2009). |
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The Film
 Seven Sinners (Albert de Courville, 1936) 
Released in 1936, Albert de Courville’s comedy-thriller Seven Sinners is sometimes compared to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) – and for good reason, because Seven Sinners was the first film on which screenwriters Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the writers of The Lady Vanishes, collaborated (see Brooke, 2008: np; Babington, 2002: 177). (However, the fruit of Launder and Gilliat’s second collaboration, Twelve Good Men, was released to cinemas prior to Seven Sinners.) Launder and Gilliat’s screenplays are recognised by their sharp wit, and Seven Sinners is no exception: upon first meeting insurance adjuster Caryl Fenton (Constance Cummings), John Harwood (Edmund Lowe) asks her, ‘Why aren’t you a man? [….] Why didn’t you say in your telegram that you’re a woman’. ‘It never occurred to me’, Fenton replies. ‘Well, you can’t be very observant’, Harwood quips back.  
A loose adaptation of Bernard Merivale and Arnold Ridley’s 1924 play The Wrecker (which had already been filmed by Michael Balcon, under its original title, in 1928), Seven Sinners focuses on private investigator John Harwood. During the Nice Carnival, Harwood – attending a fancy dress party at the Hotel Gallico and dressed as a devil – befriends a mysterious man, Heinrich Wagner (Allan Jeayes), who is wearing a grotesque mask. Wagner helps a drunken Harwood, who has lost his keys, to gain entrance to his hotel room. Later, Harwood pays a visit to his newfound friend and finds him slumped across a table, still wearing his mask. Presuming the man to be simply drunk, Harwood begins to prepare a drink for him; however, he soon discovers that the man is dead. Harwood seeks help; on his way to the hotel’s front desk, he meets a woman. The woman reveals herself to be Caryl Fenton, who has been sent by the Worldwide Insurance Company in New York to help Harwood in his case, which involves recovering some missing jewellery. Harwood enlists Fenton’s help in alerting the hotel management to the presence of the corpse; but when Harwood, Fenton and the hotel staff return to the room in which Harwood found the body, they find that the corpse has vanished – there is no evidence to corroborate Harwood’s insistence that Wagner has been killed in the hotel. Fenton insists that she and Harwood catch their train out of the city. The train crashes, and stumbling from the wreckage Harwood sees the corpse of Wagner. Harwood decides to alert the authorities and consults a French detective, Turbe (Thomy Bourdelle). Harwood concludes that the train crash was engineered in order that Wagner’s body could be planted at the scene in order to cover-up his murder. The mystery in motion, Harwood reteams with Fenton; and together they investigate the murder of Wagner.   
The film contains some striking, almost abstract, visuals: the picture opens with stock footage of the Nice carnival, which is followed almost immediately by an abstract shot of balloons tumbling across the ceiling of the Hotel Gallico; a dissolve reveals a mysterious man (later revealed to be Wagner) introduced in a shot framed through a mirror – the man is wearing a grotesque mask and smoking an oversized cigar. Later, the first train wreck is presented via a series of almost disconnected shots connected via a series of lap dissolves; the overall effect is not dissimilar to that experienced when viewing some of Man Ray’s non-narrative avant-garde films of the 1920s and 1930s. The film’s second of three train crashes, which comes at approximately three quarters of the way through the picure’s narrative, is even more spectacular, although it is presented in a far more conventional manner. (However, this particular sequence of action is lifted from the 1928 adaptation of The Wrecker.)   
Launder and Gilliat’s plotting is complex and the narrative can be difficult to decipher. As with Launder and Gilliat’s work on The Lady Vanishes, the narrative of Seven Sinners is elliptical and, therefore, has an almost nightmarish quality to it: the mysterious disappearance of Wagner’s body is a mystery on a par with the disappearance of Miss Froy (May Whitty) in The Lady Vanishes, revealing a conspiracy that is uncovered by the film’s two protagonists, Harwood and Fenton. In its focus on the comically antagonistic relationship between Edmund Lowe and Constance Cummings’ characters, Seven Sinners also alludes to the biting male-female relationships at the heart of many of the Hollywood screwball comedies that were popular during the 1930s and 1940s. This, combined with the casting of two American actors (Cummings and Lowe), in the lead roles – an attempt to capture an international audience – means that the film sometimes lacks the strong sense of cultural identity that characterises The Lady Vanishes and much of Launder and Gilliat’s later work. Nevertheless, the film is carried on the wit of Launder and Gilliat’s screenplay, some striking visuals, the performances of Lowe and Cummings and the three spectacular train crashes that take place at key points in the narrative. 
The film runs for 66:47mins (PAL) and appears to be uncut, opening with the BBFC ‘A’ certificate.
Video
The monochrome image is soft throughout but displays good contrast. The film is presented in its original screen ratio (1.33:1). 
Audio
Presented via a two-channel mono track, audio is audible but suffers from some distortion, presumably due to the age of the source material. There are no subtitles.
Extras
Sadly, there is no contextual material.
Overall
Whilst not a great film, Seven Sinners is a lot of fun, largely thanks to the witty, sparring interplay between the two lead characters – a defining characteristic of much of Launder and Gilliat’s work. The film also contains some striking visuals. This DVD release contains a perfectly acceptable presentation of the film. Sources: Babington, Bruce, 2002: British Film Makers: Launder and Gilliat. Manchester University Press Brooke, Michael, 2008: ‘Seven Sinners (1936)’. [Online.] http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/512855/index.html For more information, please visit the homepage of Network DVD.
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